Linux - Wireless NetworkingThis forum is for the discussion of wireless networking in Linux.

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Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide

This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.

I'm in Ireland and I bought one of these solo. The "brand" name is e-tech (www.e-tech.nu) and their model number is WLPC03.

On their website they say there is no Linux support for this particular card, but I downloaded the Suse driver from the realtek website, built it ontop of a stock RedHat 9 and it worked (eventually).

Note that the Suse driver on the realtek website (rtl8180_24x_suse82.zip) seems to be the most recent, updated sometime in May. The RedHat driver, last updated in March, simply doesn't work for me. It just doesn't see my Airport access point. The Suse driver works fine.

Also note that I was pulling my hair out for a while trying to get WEP working. The driver was reliably crashing whenever I tried to enable it. It turns out that I believed the "help" command and tried to set encmode=wep. encmode isn't a recoginsed parameter anymore and attempting to set it seems to screw up the driver. After attempting to set encmode, then doing an enable, the driver ran for a few seconds, whinged about getting some deauthentication frames and then locked the machine solid, flashing the CAPS LED.

After a clean install of RH9 I am posting from the laptop using the WPC11 v4. Did all the same things as with Mandrake 9.1 but, for whatever reason, RedHat works. Just a ./wlanup now gets me on-line. Can't really figure out why but I love it. RH9 works with the card very easily. Anyway, you CAN make the card work with linux.

I forgot to mention that you need to go to your AP setup screen, get the dns servers from there, go to the DHCP screen and apply the dns servers there or you wont get past your AP. Trivial, but hard to figure out after an 18 hour day.

Having read the full history of this thread, am I right in assuming no one has managed to get this working in MDK9.1 at all? I've been struggling with the driver myself the last while and haven't gotten very far, experiencing much the same problems as other's have mentioned.

Finegan, you're interested in other cards based on the same chipset? I've got a PCMCIA card from Edimax (http://www.edimax.com/) model number EW7106PC.

Edimax also distribute a Linux driver for their card from their website, I guess it's based on the Realtek one. However, don't bother trying: I tried to load the Redhat 7.3 driver into a base Redhat 7.3 install - driver wouldn't load due to unresolved symbols!! Driver's version string states it was compiled against a 'custom' redhat kernel - anyone care to try and determine what the settings were? :-)

I already picked up a member of the family from a Fly-By-Night called LanReady, it'll be here tomorrow, and hopefully shortly after that I'll have an opportunity to contribute to this thread...

Of course, that's after I switch my main laptop back over to Slackware from OpenBSD.

Ditch the pre-compiled binaries... compile that puppy after a "make clean", and make certain to get a copy of the SuSe 8.2 labelled source, none of this should be as distro-specific as it seems to be, the binary-only library that the module compiles upon may have been compiled with the wrong glibc, but it looks like the one that comes with the SuSe set has some bugs worked out.

Unfortunately (fortunately? I dunno) I am already working off the Suse labelled driver and am compiling it myself. That driver is actually causing my MDK9.1 system to panic. Plus, it doesn't dump because it was in an interrupt handler so I can't even analyse it. I think the word might be 'grrraaahh'. It only panics when I 'enable' the card - I can actually load the driver and configure everything (apparently) okay. Once I enable..BOOOM.

Anyhoo, after 2 kernel panics files began to disappear from my ext3 filesystem (what do you mean you can't find /usr/bin/perl?!?) so I'm going to install RH9 to see if everything plays nice together in that. Guaranteed I'll get the wireless networking going now at the expense of sound or something.

Incidentally, I tried compiling the rh8 driver as well (open source part almost entirely the same, closed source part different). That actually loads too, accepts settings and enables without panicing. All it does though is have the 'Tx/Rx' light flash about 5 times then everything goes quiet again. Messages in syslog indicate the same error others reported of not joining a BSSID.

Somewhere else in this thread someone was enabling debug messages by compiling it in. You can actually do that on the command line by uttering
iwpriv wlan0 msg_level <mask>
(or was it iwpriv wlan0 wlan_para msg_level=<mask>...one of the 2 anyway)

The debug level is a bitmask, so lashing in 255 will pretty much guarantee you get everything on.

Somewhere else in this thread someone was enabling debug messages by compiling it in. You can actually do that on the command line by uttering
iwpriv wlan0 msg_level <mask>
...
The debug level is a bitmask, so lashing in 255 will pretty much guarantee you get everything on.

Originally posted by orankelly Unfortunately (fortunately? I dunno) I am already working off the Suse labelled driver and am compiling it myself. That driver is actually causing my MDK9.1 system to panic. Plus, it doesn't dump because it was in an interrupt handler so I can't even analyse it. I think the word might be 'grrraaahh'. It only panics when I 'enable' the card - I can actually load the driver and configure everything (apparently) okay. Once I enable..BOOOM.

Hi,
as mentioned in my earlier posts, this is exactly what was happenning to me on my RedHat 9 system. As soon as I enabled the card there was a few seconds of activity and then a panic.

My problem, it may or may not be the same for you, was that because I run a network with WEP, I was trying to set the encmode param as mentioned in the help messages. However, this param no longer exists in the Suse driver. Stop trying to set it and the whole thing works fine.